The previous low was recorded in 2007 when trust in newspapers reached 22 percent.

Trust in newspapers has undergone steady erosion since its 1979 high of 51 percent, Gallup reports.

Television news fares no better in the estimation of those polled by Gallup. Trust in TV news tied that of newspapers with 23 percent saying they trust TV news sources. This is down from a 1993 high of 46 percent–when Gallup first began asking about it.Read more

During the May 22 broadcast of National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation,” host Neil Conan repeatedly contradicted a guest by claiming that the IRS has nothing at all to do with Obamacare. NPR’s Conan is, of course, completely incorrect. The IRS is up to it’s Tea Party harassing neck in Obamacare.

The guest Conan contradicted was Kellyanne Conway, a Republican strategist and pollster. Conway was on to discuss the various scandals in which Obama is mired and close to the end of her segment she questioned how the American people can trust the IRS to implement Obamacare.

Conan initially pressed her on the claim saying that she must have “misspoken.”

“And I think you may have misspoken earlier, Kellyanne Conway, about the IRS and its role in health care,” the host claimed. “It is responsible for collecting the fine if somebody does not get healthcare, it’s not responsible whether somebody gets healthcare or not.”Read more

Obama and his flapping-mouthed flacks keep saying with each new scandal that President Obama had “no knowledge” of any of these scandals. They claim that others are responsible and he is innocent.

He didn’t know about Benghazi, he didn’t know about the IRS’ attacks on Tea Party groups, he didn’t know of the DOJ’s violation of freedom of the press, he didn’t know… well, apparently he didn’t know of anything.

National Public Radio recently aired a radio program focused on federal food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). NPR presented the assistance program as seemingly costless–in fact, said it was an economic boon to states–and also acted as both an advocate and salesman for SNAP.

Additionally, NPR couldn’t seem figure out why the program had grown so tremendously even though “the economy has kind of started to improve.” Naturally, the taxpayer funded radio show did not note the millions of Americans that have simply given up looking for work in this second great depression.

The program also faulted Republicans saying they wanted to eliminate food stamps and cause poor people to go hungry

Typical of when a Democrat is president, during a keynote monologue at the White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD), the President is spared from too many mean spirited barbs. In keeping with that tradition, TBS’ Conan O’Brien poked a lot of fun at Republicans and conservatives with a bit sharper stick than he used to poke Democrats.

This year’s WHCD started with a slew of media outlets discussing the now annual slam on the event as delivered by long-time Washington reporter Tom Brokaw. The semi-retired NBC anchor has lamented for some time that the whole party atmosphere, replete with musicians and Hollywood celebrities–fittingly, this year the Duck Dynasty folks attended–makes a mockery of the seriousness of the media’s work.

After the President delivered his spiel on Saturday night, late night comedian Conan O’Brien took the stage to deliver the keynote address.

Unsurprisingly, Republicans showed up early as the comedian’s targets and naturally, even though he hasn’t been in office for over four years, now, an obligatory slam of George W. Bush as “stupid” had to be delivered.

Near the top of his address Conan mentioned the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library joking that the library had “Millions of books, articles and documents and if you go you can be the first to read them.”Read more

The White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD) has been a mainstay Washington to-do for years. Lately, however, it has come under fire for turning Hollywood–literally. In the wake of the event, some outlets continued the bashing but most lavished attention on the dinner or at least lauded it as harmless fun.

One of the quickest to slam the event was Sarah Palin, who did not attend. From her Twitter account, Palin indulged some rather salty language in criticism.

That #WHCD was pathetic. The rest of America is out there working our asses off while these DC assclowns throw themselves a #nerdprom

Juan Williams has had to admit that a recent column he wrote contained full sections of a report by the liberal Center for American Progress and that he failed to attribute the source.

Williams used CAP’s work, in some cases word-for-word, in a February 18 column on immigration but failed to note that the information came from the liberal advocacy group.

When Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald initially reported the incident, Williams blamed an assistant for the omission.

On March 7, Williams said that a “young man” in his office gave him the information from the CAP report but Williams claimed he thought it was his assistant’s work and he included it in his own piece on that basis. “I had never seen the CAP report myself,” Williams said.Read more

Recently NPR’s Morning Edition aired a segment on Chicago’s “gun violence” featuring taped comments from local Catholic Priest Father Michael Pfleger. Unfortunately the taxpayer-funded radio show presented Pflager as a benign “social activist” and never informed listeners of just how radical this man is.

The segment focused on President Obama’s Friday, February 15, visit to Chicago that was meant to highlight his anti-gun policies. Without fully informing listeners about their radical ties, NPR played taped comments from the long-time, left-wing priest and two other Chicago-based activists to speak to what Chicagoans were thinking.

Chicagoans are likely to know all about Father Michael Pfleger, pastor of Saint Sabina’s Catholic Church on the city’s South Side. It’s hard to miss him as he interjects himself into the news as often as he can. But NPR listeners outside the Windy City aren’t likely to know what an extremist the man is.

At the end of the segment, NPR’s Cheryl Corley played some tape of Father Pfleger who talked about the city’s plague of gun violence as he saw it. Corley introduced him only as “a social activist who lost a foster son to gun violence.”

Naturally, Father Pfleger is all in favor of Obama’s gun-ban ideas. But he is far more than a mere “social activist.” In fact, he is quite extreme in his “activism.”Read more

Ahead of the President’s State of the Union speech, taxpayer funded National Public Radio (NPR) tried to help the White House push the false notion that the sequestration budget cut policy was conceived by the Republicans. In truth, it was initiated by Obama and pushed by the Democrat Party.

In order to advertise its coverage, NPR tweeted that sequestration was a “Republican invention.”

“Though A Republican Invention, Obama Could Get Blamed For Sequester… With the deadline approaching for automatic spending cuts, Republicans in Congress are pushing hard to rebrand the cuts that were agreed to as part of the debt-ceiling agreement of 2011,” NPR claimed.Read more

The news that Hostess Brands is on the verge of shutting down is a major story across the country this week but NPR found humor in the fact that up to 18,000 employees could be losing their jobs.

What was so funny? On its radio show, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, NPR decided to look down its nose upon the products Hostess makes and, in turn, its customer base.

During its November 17 broadcast, host Peter Sagal introduced a segment on the Hostess story listing the company’s products at the end of which he added “Fudge Puppies, Fat Crammers, and Lard Bursts.”

That wasn’t all the guffawing the hosts indulged. Mo Rocca wondered if Hostess were liquidated it might be “neon-colored,” and Faith Salie introduced Chris Christie to the mix to which Peter Sagal went on to impersonate the New Jersey Governor.Read more

NPR’s Ari Shapiro doesn’t stand for the national anthem and won’t recite the pledge of allegiance. Why? Because he places his position as a “journalist” above love of county. But, one wonders, does Shapiro understand that without this country he wouldn’t be free to be a journalist?

On his NPR blog, Shapiro was thoroughly pleased with himself for imagining that a job was more important than his country, so much so that he thought enlightening the world with the debate on his Twitter account over his lack of patriotism was warranted.

The NPR reporter noted that at a recent Romney rally he was one of the few that refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and that refusal made him take to Twitter with his anti-patriotism position.Read more

Journalists used to pride themselves on their independence. They once thought that hard questions were their stock and trade especially when it came to hurling those questions at politicians. But even as they congratulate each other for their efforts — as NPR did recently — it appears that hard questions and independence is much lower on their list these days where it concerns President Obama. As it happens journalists are only asking those questions that are pre-approved by the White House.

On September 11, NPR’s Morning Edition gave a very warm welcome to Michael Lewis whose interviews of Barack Obama are soon to debut in the October issue of Vanity Fair. On NPR Lewis’ interviews were called “compelling narratives” and his every utterance was given breathless audience.

National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg appeared on the July 20 episode of PBS’s Inside Washington when the discussion turned back to Obama’s attack on American businesses and those successful enough to become a target of the his ire. But Totenberg wasn’t going for any blame being assigned to Obama. To her the problem isn’t Obama’s attack on the business sector, but that bankers and businessmen who are “super-crooked.”

When asked if she thought Obama’s tax-the-rich election ploy was going to work, Totenberg thought it would, saying the problems we face are not the President’s fault and his attacks on the business sector are justified.

This may sound like a contradiction, but tax-supported National Public Radio is hiring more lobbyists to help get more tax dollars sent its way.

In what many see as a parasitic relationship, NPR is using tax dollars to hire the big lobbying firm of Navigators Global charging them with the duty of keeping the spigot of federal funds open in the face of the spending cuts being talked about in Washington.

NPR feels the need to look out after its interests as House Republicans are advancing a spending bill through committee that would defund the public broadcasting service.Read more

Proving that no misdeed goes unrewarded on the left, reports have it that once Microsoft and NBC News break up housekeeping and put an end to MSNBC.com in its current form, the resulting new Internet outlet will be getting a new chief. And that new chief will be none other than Vivian Schiller, the disgraced former head of National Public Radio (NPR).

The Juan Williams mess wasn’t the only thing that Schiller mishandled while chief of NPR. She was also involved in the tap dancing the publicly funded radio outlet performed when independent citizen journalists Shaughn Adeleye and the anonymous “Simon Templar” plied an undercover camera that caught NPR execs agreeing to take millions in donations from what they understood to be the Muslim Brotherhood, as well known terror outfit from the Middle East.Read more

At around 130 days until Election Day, National Public Radio thought it would be nice to give the President a little boost by going back to its 2008 practice of assigning to Obama the god-like powers of The One, The Light Bringer, The Obammessiah.

This time tax dollar supported NPR thought it would be nice to air the claim that the mere sound of Obama’s voice can part the clouds, stop that depressing ol’ rain, and bring out the sun. No, really.

On Tuesday, June 26, NPR correspondent Scott Horsley reported from a New Hampshire Obama rally and his report reads alternately like a campaign advertisement for President Obama, a Super PAC attack ad on Mitt Romney, and a cult-like deification of The One.

Horsley starts by noting that Obama’s fans stood in a pouring rain patiently awaiting to bask in his miraculous presence and after saying a few words about Obama and his campaign, launched into a series of distorted slams on Mitt Romney.Read more

When it broke, the Old Media was all over Mike Daisey’s story of the horrid working conditions at Apple Computer’s foreign manufacturing plants. The story had oppressed workers, pathos, and best of all, eeevil corporate greed. Daisey was well on the road to making Apple the liberal’s newest bete noire and was being hailed as the next Upton Sinclair. Until, that is, it became clear that he made it all up.

One of the first major media outlets to push Daisey’s anti-Apple claims was the program This American Life aired on the venerable Public Radio station WBEZ. The program featured Daisey’s claims in a January episode, but has now been faced with the “difficult news,” as representatives of the show have said, of Daisey’s fabrication.Read more

If you want to see a perfect example of how the left-wing media plans to smear and destroy Mitt Romney should he win the GOP nomination, no better example can be found than the hoax over a photo that lefties every where are trying to sell as evidence of Romney’s “privileged” life. Lefties say the photo in question shows Romney “getting his shoes shined” before getting on a private jet during his campaign travel. That is not what the photo shows, of course, but let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good left-wing mudslinging, OK?

The meme began from a photo by Getty showing Romney sitting in a chair on the tarmac with his foot up and a red-jacketed worker attending to the candidate’s footwear. The left immediately assumed that Romney was getting his shoes shined before getting on a “corporate” jet. This story was made up out of whole cloth because in reality what the picture shows is Romney getting his shoes wanded by an explosive sniffing device wielded by a TSA agent before being allowed to board the plane.

The photo seems to have appeared early on the blog of the MSNBC smear show The Ed Schultz Show with the headline, “Romney Creates Another Job.” The caption set the tone for the left-wing onslaught to come saying, “Mitt Romney created another job with his presence alone… a job giving shoe shines on the tarmac in front of a corporate jet.”Read more

I suppose we couldn’t get past the one-year anniversary of the crime against Democrat Representative Gabrielle Giffords without some Old Media outlet blaming the supposed “heated” political rhetoric of the day for her shooting. On Sunday we saw NPR doing just that. The fact is, no matter how many times they say it, politics and the “heated rhetoric” thereof had absolutely nothing at all to do with Giffords’ shooting. The linking of the crime to politics is just not legitimate.

On this one-year anniversary, NPR’s Linton Weeks was all about the improvement of our “civil discourse,” and full of lament that it just isn’t happening. Perhaps it is a noble sentiment, but he marred that nobility by beginning his piece with a false allusion once again tying the Giffords shooting to the “political atmosphere” of the day.

“When a gunman opened fire on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords,” Linton wrote, “some people were quick to blame the episode on the overheated political climate.”

With that false allusion we also know what NPR meant to do. It meant to blame conservatives for Giffords’ shooting.

Let’s face it, liberal media bias has been around since there have been liberals to do the “reporting” of the news. But this fact should surprise no one. After all, the news media has always been filled with bias of one type or another. In fact, there was a time when American customers of the news knew exactly which newspapers sported which point of view. It was taken for granted that one newspaper supported one side and another newspaper a different side.

But in the late 1950s and early 1960s that all changed. Suddenly the folks in the news media began to present themselves as unbiased pursuers of “the truth.” Gone was the out-in-front bias and instead the media cloaked itself in a new air of detachment, a new just-the-facts mien.

This new era in media conceit coincided with the advent of a liberal mindset that took on the weight of the world, a new era in which liberals felt that their ideals rose above God, tradition and country….

On Wednesday morning the GOP led House of Representatives voted to end federal funding for National Public Radio. Saying it made good fiscal sense it is also safe to say that the GOP was catering to its base, a group that has been against funding for NPR for some time.

The bill passed in a 228-192 vote mostly along party lines and will prohibit local NPR stations from using federal funds as well as cut all current funding. This eliminates almost $5 million in federal funding that NPR receives. The bill would not prevent the use of federal funds for producing programs by private firms and individuals…

In the midst of the uproar over National Public Radio (NPR), one factor either has been ignored or simply not even realized: The United States already has an official US Government “voice.” It is The Voice of America (VOA), a longtime broadcaster offering listeners around the world the official views of the US Government in an unabashed fashion.

Straight from the VOA website (http://www.voanews.com) in their own words, with no spin by those pro or con, the agency itself says: “The Voice of America, which first went on the air in 1942, is an international multimedia broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government through the Broadcasting Board of Governors. The VOA broadcasts approximately 1,500 hours of news, information, educational, and cultural programming every week to an estimated worldwide audience of 123 million people.” Why, then, you are asking yourself, do we need to give The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and National Public Radio (NPR) taxpayer money approaching half a billion dollars this year? All of those organizations, I hasten to add, have every right to continue to exist. They have every right to compete for our eyes and ears, for our money spent on advertised products. The line should be drawn, however, at the receipt of your tax dollars.Read more

As of yesterday’s debut of James O’Keefe’s video showing NPR executives revealing their hatred for Americans while cozying up to enemies of the country by schmoozing with what the execs thought were radical Muslims willing to donate money to NPR, the CEO of NPR has now resigned.

Vivian Schiller, the woman responsible for the hashed-up firing of Juan Williams last year, has resigned in the face of pressure from NPR’s board. After meetings yesterday evening the board told Schiller that it would be best if she resigned and so she did. Good riddance to bad rubbish.Read more

Undercover video maker James O’Keefe has struck again. This time he had his crew pose as members of a radical Islamic group that wanted to donate $5 million to National Public Radio (NPR) and during the lunch NPR execs said that they loved the radical Muslim group and hated American conservatives and Tea Partiers.

Remember, folks, we are supporting these terror-loving anti-Americans with out tax money…

Speaking of tax money, another very, very interesting bit of this video is that these NPR execs admitted that they really didn’t need the federal tax money that they are given every year. They admitted that they’d easily get by if it disappeared.

But imagine. Your tax money is going to support an American media outlet that hates half of America and finds themselves disposed to easily side with enemies of America that are responsible for terrorist attacks against us.

I once knew a guy who was about 50 pounds overweight. Any time a friend or family member would address him on the issue of cutting out the sweets, he would get indignant and quickly inform inquiring souls that he was completely fit in all areas except his midriff, which he would address in his own good time. We might surmise that from this gentleman’s thinking he thought his body was nothing short of a series of physical quadrants of which he had worked to address all but a final set of coordinates: his stomach. More than likely, the man was just fat and did not like being told so.

Brian Montopoli of CBS News tells us that National Public Radio no longer goes by that name; it’s NPR now. Well, I mean, the legal name is still National Public Radio as it has been for the last 40 years but they now request their brand name “NPR” be the title spoken on air. Why? Like a fat man demanding that he be called “Speedo-challenged” instead of simply overweight, National Public Radio is trying to run the fat-man scam on Americans. Montopoli talks about conservative pundits like Sarah Palin who call for cutting off public funding to National Public Radio and he insinuates that Palin is misguided as the federal funds the non-profit organization receives are considered by him as minimal. While the overall percentage may be less than 10 percent of their total budget, NPR receives millions of public tax dollars yearly. The case Montopoli forwards is as compelling an argument as when our gentleman friend with the mild protuberance tells us he has reduced his daily cupcake intake from twelve to nine of the tasty treats. Of course, the point is that he should not eat any, especially if we the American people have to flip the bill for the indulgence.Read more

Everyone is talking about the situation that commentator Juan Williams found himself in when National Public Radio fired him over comments he made on Fox News about Muslims. And whether you think Williams’s situation was properly handled or not, a second discussion has been raised in conjunction with it: the propriety of federal funding of NPR and PBS.

On the funding issue, no more convoluted argument about the necessity of federal money being spent on NPR can be found than an article that appeared in the New York Daily News penned by the executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, Michael Meyers. His op ed stood four-square in favor of continued federal funding of public radio and public television but his reason was simply illogical and impossible to understand.

Saying that those that support Juan Williams’s supporters, “vindictively want to totally de-fund the left-leaning NPR” because of Williams’s firing. He felt that those that want to take away federal funding from NPR are making a “big mistake.”

The headline on the National Public Radio website said, “NPR Ends Williams’ Contract After Muslim Remarks”, but it should have said, “NPR Fires Williams for Telling the Truth.”

I am familiar with Juan Williams as Fox News Channel’s designated liberal. I have often wondered how Williams found time for NPR because he is on Fox morning, noon and night. The other night he was on with the incredibly popular Bill O’Reilly discussing the way the ladies of “The View” had thrown a hissy-fit over Bill’s comment that “Muslims killed Americans” on 9/11.

Well, yes, Muslims had planned it, funded it, and were the perpetrators. Not all Muslims, but all those involved in the terrorist act that involved hijacking four commercial airliners. Muslims have been killing people in London, Madrid, Moscow, Bali, Mumbai, and other places for a very long time when not killing other Muslims in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. In the aftermath of 9/11 some Muslims were dancing in the streets to celebrate the attack on the Great Satan.Read more

In a sign of these dismal times, the oldest family farm in America is up for sale because its owners just cannot survive this down economy. After 378 years of contiguous family ownership and operation, the Tuttle family of Dover, New Hampshire is selling its 134-acre farm.

Founded in 1632 by John Tuttle fresh off the boat from the Old World, the Tuttle family farm has moved on with the times, improved and changed to continue operating. But, at long last, this economy is too much for them to bear.

Curiously, the Associated Press worked very hard to downplay the economic side of this argument in its coverage and instead played up the fact that the Tuttles are aging and have decided to discourage their own sons from taking up the family business. The APs story also turned the focus away from the bad economy and toward blaming WalMart and the “growth of supermarket chains.”Read more

On the day after his historic primary win, National Public Radio rabidly went after Rand Paul, newly minted GOP nominee for Kentucky Senator, trying to make him out to be a KKK sympathizer or perhaps a racist that would have agreed to keep Jim Crow alive and well in 1964. This rabid, left-wing attack is uncalled for and, further, is meant only to stir anti-Republican hatred and not to help voters discover anything relevant about nominee Rand Paul.

Nearly at the top of the interview the host of NPR’s All Things Considered tried to paint Mr. Paul as some sort of hater that would have opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Catch this loaded and irrelevant question by NPR:

You’ve said that business should have the right to refuse service to anyone and that the Americans for Disabilities Act, the ADA, was an over reach by the federal government, would you say the same by extension of the 1964 Civil Rights Act?

Paul gave a very good reply but the best thing he said was that he hadn’t read through the entire 1964 legislation because it had been passed 40 years ago and didn’t have any role in today’s campaign. And that is just it, isn’t it? The 1964 Civil Rights Act is ancient history as far as current politics goes. It is fully accepted and is not a law in dispute, nor does it have any part in current political discussion. The law is fact the legitimacy of which no one questions. Talking about the 1964 Civil Rights Act is not relevant alt all to today’s issues.Read more

National Public Radio has decided to change its labels for the two sides of the abortion issue. Unfortunately, its change skews the debate rhetorically in favor of the pro-abortion side by softening the fact that they are for abortion and by making of their position a “right.”

Previously, NPR was using the terms “pro-choice” and “pro-life” but a recent post by the NPR Ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, delved into the ire that the pro-abortion side wallows in over the fact that the pro-life side has “won the war of words” because they are identified as supporting life. Shepard decided that NPR should “pick more neutral terms.”Read more

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-By Warner Todd Huston
A new poll on newspapers and television news shows that Americans' confidence in the news industry continues to erode in this era of mass communications, reaching a low not seen s